Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Overall I enjoyed this book. It was pretty slow at the
beginning and I really didn’t like Magnus at first. In the beginning I thought he was going to be
a carbon copy of Percy…but a few pages in you realize that Magnus is a jaded
jerk. It took quite a while for me to
warm up to him, but it does happen – you just have to push through the parts
where he’s a jerk.

The story took a LOT of time to build up the world and give
you history on the Gods and Norse history. But once they finally got on their
quest, the story finally started moving.
The Hotel Valhalla was a lot of fun – I think Riordan does a good job
with modernizing his stories. There will be a lot of things in his books that
will one day date his books. My kid’s
kids probably won’t understand the Taylor Swift references, and such.

I’m still a bit weirded out about the whole sword thing
[SPOILER: It’s really strange to me that it flies and talks. I liked that
it was pulled toward it’s destiny so that was something that Magnus had to
fight in the end. END SPOILER]

I thought the small battle scene was decent. I liked the way
that Magnus handled both situations. It
was satisfying and well done.

I didn’t like part of the ending where we just got an info
dump. “He explained this…” “He explained that” “And he explained this”. UGH.
Did Riordan's editor say he needed to cut pages at the end so that’s
what he chose to do?? I also didn’t like
the explanation at the end regarding the prophecy. If it’s not easily understandable by the end
of the story, then I don’t think he did a good job explaining it in the story.

The parts with Annabeth are my favorite and I know every
single Percy fan is going to be squealing like a school girl at the end where it
states Magnus will need Annabeth's help before all is said and done!

There was a lot of loose ends left open but a decent enough
wrap up to close the first book.
Obviously we know there is going to be a sequel and I look forward to
reading it.